Life Drawing is often defended as allowable because it offers
such good practice to artists in achieving something difficult. Life
drawing appears to "need" defense and excuses because our society
feels discomfort, and even guilt, at the nakedness (including
especially the open sexual character) of the models. Drawing people
does offer good practice, and it is very difficult to do well;
apples, tables, mountains, oceans, horses, and ideas share the same
qualifications. The defense doesn't work. A fall-back from the
first defense is that, in life drawing, an artist is using simply the
body, not the person, to depict. Where this is true (and teachers,
artists, and models often think they should make it true), the number
one reality of the model, self, is being skipped. This is damaging
to each person involved in a life-drawing session, as well as to the
art that results from it.
An alternate approach begins with the declaration that what is
most likely to fascinate us is people - ourselves as people and
others as people - and that what fascinates us most about people is
likely to hold greatest importance in our art. The less clothing
someone is wearing, the more person is available to draw - if that
person can project self while naked. Some of us can't do that - and
turn out, after a while, to be very boring as models. There are a
good many books written to help artists learn to use their tools
correctly in life drawing; but there are not many books which are
designed to help artists and models work together with each other as
fellow human beings and as co-contributors to the development of
works of art. This tries to be such a book.
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